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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Schoolteachers and Bureaucrats

Schoolteachers and Bureaucrats

The discussion of the value of Catholic schools, especially among the laity, is never a dull matter. I recall how a couple of parish priests in Christchurch were alarmed by an article in the Tablet in which the writer expressed the view that Catholic schools were somewhat outmoded. So the two priests restricted the distribution of the Tablet to their parishioners. Such reactions seem to me excessive, just as any demand for the abolition of Catholic schools is itself excessive; but words are words, and express feelings as much as they express ideas; and it seems to me that we have to pay the cost of a certain amount of intellectual discomfort if the manner of controversy in New Zealand Catholic circles is to become more honest and less inhibited.

I can hardly remember meeting a single lapsed Catholic who did not obliquely compare their first entry into a Catholic school, or at least their treatment in Catholic schools during the crises of adolescence, to the experiences of a soul in Purgatory. These were on the whole sensitive people; perhaps over-sensitive. If their true objection to the Church rested on their negative experience endured in the course of receiving a Catholic education (‘How can the Church be the Church if Sister X is a sadist and Brother Y a blundering ignoramus?’) then I think they should have remained in the page 418 Church, and raised their voices, however bluntly, for a reform of those educational methods. And most fortunately that is what is happening today. Such people remain with the Church and share their negative experience with their fellow Catholics. Is this sabotage? Indeed not. However sharp the controversy may grow, it is a legitimate expression of the family tensions that crop up among the people of God.

My own problem is quite different. I grew up under the care of secular teachers – some of them Quakers, some of no discernible religion – and in my heart of hearts, remembering various no doubt unavoidable traumas and atrocities and spiritual corridors of dense gloom, I would much prefer to have had no education at all, but grown up on a South Island sheep station, or else at a northern fishing settlement among the Maoris, somewhere near the vine-growing area. To me all education looks sad and tastes sour. And I’m inclined to think that many of those inside the Church who throw verbal bombs at the Catholic schools are in fact objecting – though they don’t know it – not so much to Catholic education as to education itself, that gigantic fetish of modern man. And the reason we react so sharply to bad psychological conditions in Catholic schools, and far less sharply to the same conditions in secular schools, is surely because we recognise, even unconsciously, that the Church is our Mother whom we may legitimately expect to be kinder and better and wiser than any mere secular institution.

I have tried to sketch roughly the view of the Demolition Squad who at least verbally, are inclined to make attacks on Catholic schools from within the Church. May they never be brow-beaten into silence! They represent, perhaps, the voice of a great multitude of brow-beaten and troubled children – a voice rising in the hearts of adults, long after the event – and however subjective that voice may be, it must be heard, since Our Lord commanded this when He told His disciples not to keep the young children away from Him, and in the same breath issued the gravest warning ever uttered to any who might harm or scandalise children.

On the other side I see another phalanx – those whom I intend to call – with humour, and, I hope, not without fraternal charity – the Holy Lid Brigade. These are the people who honestly believe that any criticism of Catholic schools is essentially heretical and dangerous, a version of an attack on the Church herself. They believe that all Sisters are angels, and all Brothers and priests saints – a view which must often seem intolerable in its falsification to those wide-aware members of the Religious Orders who are privately groaning to God for various changes and reforms; for it is a view that forbids the possibility of change. Who would wish to change what is already perfect?

I suggest that there is always a certain measure of infantilism in this view. If childhood is the vanished Eden where we most resembled angels – I think this is roughly the shape of the myth – then anything associated with page 419 childhood, schools included, remains bathed in a holy light and cannot be touched or changed by the hand of man. One should deal gently with it. It is the kind of feeling an honest old drunk may have five minutes before he hoists his first brandy of the morning. Nevertheless, as a writer, I am never quite happy in the company of the Holy Lid Brigade. By forbidding controversy about the things which concern us most deeply, they prevent all intellectual and emotional development in themselves and others; and on the topic of Catholic schools I think they are seriously mistaken.

If Catholic schools were in fact angelic institutions, susceptible to the least breath of the Holy Spirit, then joy would shine on the faces of all who come out of them; if they were the kind of hell-holes that some ex-pupils remember them to be, then most Catholic parents would refuse to send their children to them, and the children would run away in droves. But if (what seems to me much more likely) they are on the whole good places staffed by dedicated people, but with points of tension, points of difficulty, points of muddle – then we can talk about them, preferably without acrimony, and let the laity (who have after all in many cases passed through them) make suggestions for their improvements. It is proper, though, that we should get our bearings from the most recent directives that the Church herself has given us; not blindly, not without interpretation in the light of particular circumstances, but still in a spirit of intelligent docility. And turning to that section of the documents of the Second Vatican Council which deals with education, I find what seem to me two key statements:

(a) ‘Parents, who have the first and the inalienable duty and right to educate their children, should enjoy true freedom in their choice of schools. . . .’
(b) ‘As for Catholic parents, the Council calls to mind their duty to entrust their children to Catholic schools, when and where this is possible. . . .’

In normal circumstances these two directives will not conflict, since Catholic parents who value the Faith will want their children to receive the kind of schooling that will help them to grow within the Faith. But it is commonly known that objective circumstances may at times be a hindrance – either because of long distances of travel, or because some special training (as in the skilled trades) may not be available in any of the Catholic schools, or for some other reason of objective hardship. Equally, but less obviously, subjective circumstances may also be a hindrance. There may, for example, be conflict between the two parents regarding the manner of education which would be best for their children; or a child may already have had an unhappy career in a local Catholic school, and the parents may reasonably judge that for its welfare they would shift it to a secular school. I have known such cases. And while it is suitable that in these circumstances the parents should ask for the Bishop’s dispensation, since the Church has so directed, I think one should also stress (as the Fathers of Vatican II have already done) that a true page 420 freedom must exist – that is, that the parents’ choice should not be merely a nominal one, and that in the long run their right of choice must come first. After all, if they do not know the intimate needs and capabilities of their children, it is unlikely that anyone else will know these things better.

Yet the general principle remains intact – namely, that Catholic parents have a duty to send their children to Catholic schools; and this would make no sense if a Catholic education did not have certain inherent advantages. Here again I turn for clarification to the documents of the Second Vatican Council:

No less than other schools does the Catholic school pursue cultural goals and the natural development of youth. But it has several distinctive purposes. It aims to create for the school community an atmosphere enlivened by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity. It aims to help the adolescent in such a way that the development of his own personality will be matched by the growth of that new creation which he became by baptism. It strives to relate all human culture eventually to the news of salvation. . . .

There is our general blueprint; and I think it has precisely been made general to allow for the widest range of comment and interpretation by ourselves the laity, who have so recently been promoted to a full share in the determination of the policies of the Church. Many Catholics feel that our schools have been somewhat timid and limited in the pursuit of ‘cultural goals and the natural development of youth’. On the other hand, the intercommunication with secular schools, who share the same natural objectives, has only recently begun to flower. In this area the Catholic schools may have a special beneficent tone of their own to contribute. I remember, at a teachers’ refresher course in the North Island, seeing a group of Sisters do an interpretative dance which showed the growth of harvest fields in the sun and wind. There were spiritual nuances in this dance which must have come to them from their vocation. It was, to say the least, very lovely indeed; and I think the secular teachers learnt something about the true nature of the Church by watching it.

But this is not what people think first about when they mention Catholic schools. They think of language study and music and perhaps science – they think chiefly of the academic disciplines. There is room here for a gradual loosening up. If the money were available I would like to see an extensive training for the trades in every large Catholic school in the country.

There is also a general criticism which non-Catholics and many devout Catholics are inclined to bring against our schools – they claim that there is frequently a Manichean tendency discernible in our education, that we ram concepts of purity down the throats of our children and adolescents in such a way that all moral problems become for them problems of purity. This is a hard nut to crack. If the criticism is well founded, then it is really up to the parents to counter any warps that crop up in their children’s education by page 421 careful home discussions; and the signs would seem to indicate that this can only be done well when the children are attending day schools.

I am inclined to think it is half true, true in pockets; for among a number of sincere teachers there will always be some who lack prudence and who unconsciously add their own emotional accretions to the intellectual diet provided by the Faith itself. In extreme cases parents should be able to approach the hierarchy and request politely that certain teachers should be set to other work. It is, after all, a problem that can also crop up in secular schools. But the worst thing for the Church and for our children is that we should adopt the Holy Lid policy and suffer it in silence.

Again, what the Council Fathers plainly envisage in the training of adolescents is a balance of natural and supernatural elements working in harmony. Though it would be delightful if our teachers were all saints, I do not think – no doubt to the sorrow of the Holy Lid Brigade – that this is morally necessary. To my mind, the strongest supernatural influence on the lives of adolescents will come from a regular reception of the Sacraments. I have always regretted that no such help was available to me during my own growing up, and there may even be various natural effects springing from the Sacraments – for example, I have noticed among Catholic adolescents a greater cheerfulness and less cynicism than one would normally find among their contemporaries outside the Visible Church. The availability of such help is the important thing – not that adolescents should be dragooned, but that they should know without a shadow of a doubt that it is there when they need it.

Perhaps I have written somewhat negatively about our schools. My own contact with their staff and pupils has been without exception harmonious and cheerful; but I come to them as a visitor, an adult received into the Church not so long ago, and so I lack experience of the tribal tensions and ambivalence of those who have been brought up in Catholic schools. Though I have given some prominence to the horror stories vended by the Demolition Squad, it does seem to me that these are in the long run rather irrelevant. Certainly a Catholic parent would be no parent if he or she did not raise Cain when a child is being taught harshly or ineptly; yet no defects on the natural level can actually remove the special supernatural advantages of Catholic schools. The Faith is still the Faith even if there are from time to time some butchers among the faithful. It would be prudent to remember that secular teachers can be equally clumsy and short-sighted. And one knows quite well that the vast majority of teachers in Catholic schools are people with humane objectives and a special sense of dedication. The problem is rather one of immaturity on the natural level – whether among the religious, the laity, or the children themselves – and this problem can only be unravelled slowly in that Gospel spirit of freedom and charity which the Second Vatican Council has recommended to us.

page 422

It is not necessary, however, for us to travel slowly in the attempt to remedy the thing that comes near to crippling our schools financially, the radical injustice that our schools do not receive full State aid. In this regard, I remember talking a good while ago with a highly placed official of the New Zealand Department of Education. Though I was at that time not yet a Catholic, I was arguing State aid to Catholic schools on the ground of common justice. He did not oppose me with any rational argument. Instead a strangely stubborn look came over his face. ‘No!’ he said vehemently. ‘I’m not on for it. Why should we have to pay for bringing up Catholics?’ At least those are the words that I remember at a distance of more than ten years.

The important thing for Catholics to realise is that the issue of State aid is not only an emotional one for us; it also involves strong emotions among those who do not belong to the Church. If these emotions did not exist, I think we would have had State aid long ago. Therefore I would like to analyse briefly the different strands of emotion that may very likely have lain behind the negative outburst of my bureaucratic friend.

His background was originally Protestant. He may even have been a Bible Class leader in his youth, and suffered a conversion to the austere doctrines of liberal agnostic humanism some time in his late teens or early twenties. But somewhere at the back of his mind a Calvinist grandmother was murmuring – ‘Tak heed, laddie! Ye maun hae no truck wi’ the Papists. They’re the Deil’s ain kind. Beads and medals and wax! Can ye no’ smell the faggots bleezing’ in Lambton Quay?’

A surprisingly large number of sincere Protestants are haunted by a grotesque image of the Church handed down intact from the times of persecution. And this image is all the harder to dissolve when it exists wholly subconsciously, under a veneer of modern educational and technological enthusiasm. Up to a point the Church herself is to blame for this image. It is only very recently that she has openly and freely acknowledged the principle of freedom of conscience in matters of religious belief, even when that conscience may be from her point of view inadequately formed. The slogan – ‘Error has no rights’ – has until recently guaranteed that no humanist of the calibre of my friend will be prepared to grant rights to the Church which she has seemed unwilling to grant to Protestants or Jews or people without fixed belief. It may take several generations before she has succeeded in convincing people like him that she really means what she says.

Even if the ghost of the Inquisition has begun to fade, there is still another source of conflict. My friend’s actual religion is of course Caesarist. He believes that the Government is the nearest thing we are likely to get to fill the vacant place left when the God of Calvin mercifully died. He is aware that the Church claims an authority separate from that of the State; and this bugs him. Why should anyone want another God than this beautiful, austere, world-changing Master made out of wire and concrete and rubber page 423 and waste paper? He is so homely, so essentially kind, so much like ourselves. He does not demand that we should become holy, only that we should become efficient; not that we should learn to love, but that we should learn to spell.

One can easily understand that my friend might feel all the outrage of the devotee when asked to condone the paying out of money to support the schools of a rival religion. For one thing, the Catholic Church is unhygienic – the central object of her devotion is a Man covered with blood and hanging from a cross. My friend, being kind, hopes there will be no more executions in the future; but if there are, he will make sure they are all hygienic and unbloody, for his god hates anything that makes a mess. No; if he hangs a work of art on the wall of his office, he will make sure it is a modern abstract, that will not torment him by reminding him that his own body sweats and smells; for what is alive can die, and my friend has a bottomless prejudice against his own death; but what has never been alive – a new office block, for example – may seem to have a kind of spurious immortality. ‘Things are on the move’ is my friend’s favourite slogan; and he adds at times, though more quietly than his counterpart behind the Iron or the Bamboo Curtain – ‘so get out of the way, mate, before you get run over!’

There is also the matter of my friend’s natural parsimony. His god can’t function without quite a lot of money; and my friend regards it as his business to make sure that as much as possible of that money stays in its proper place, the Treasury, which is the temple of the god. If the priests and Brothers and Sisters are silly enough to work for next to nothing, why should he prevent them? He will make quite sure that his own pipeline connecting him to the Superannuation Fund is kept in good working order.

Again – why shouldn’t he? He is not really avaricious on his own behalf. It is more a matter of seeing that the public money he has to administer flows into the right channel. There’s that pamphlet of his friend Charles on ‘The Right and the Wrong Use of the Colon’, for example – a real breakthrough in the educational field. Charles would be most disappointed if less than fifty thousand copies were printed and distributed to the schools. That will cost quite a bit of money. First things have to come first. And even if there were ten times as much money available aid to Catholic schools would come right at the bottom of the list.

I have mentioned few of the possible reasons for my friend’s negative reaction; and no doubt there are quite a few more; for he is a more complicated man than one might suppose at first. At least his psychiatrist is of that opinion. But it is time to have a look at the Catholic side of the picture.

The Church does not have enough money to provide for her schools. The money that she does have comes entirely from the pockets of the faithful, who also have to pay the ordinary taxes to provide for the education of their neighbours’ children at secular schools. There is a point of justice here – as obvious as a fully developed carbuncle to the eyes of the Catholic who is page 424 filling in his income tax form, but unfortunately invisible to the eyes of my bureaucratic friend. One has to accept the possibility that he will never be able to see it.

If the Church taught only Catholic doctrine in her schools, it would be strange for her to expect State aid; but she teaches Physical Education and social studies and languages and music and several other things. She does the same job with her schools that the secular schools are doing. Why shouldn’t she get State aid?

The only logical argument against it would have to be that Catholics are trained to hold the State in contempt, to practise civil disobedience, to break the State’s laws without moral censure from the Church, to disrupt the secular economy. But this is not the case. The argument had a small grain of sense in it in the days of the first Queen Elizabeth when a certain Pope made a grave social and political blunder by excommunicating a ruler who had never had any wish to be a member of the Visible Church; and even then a huge majority of English Catholics were openly patriotic, calling down blessings on the Virgin Monarch even when they were being hanged, disembowelled and hacked to pieces for the crime of going to Mass. It makes no sense nowadays. A possible argument might be that the Catholic population is inherently more intelligent and talented than those who are not Catholic, and so, to be fair to everyone, Catholic children should be handicapped by being given poorer educational facilities. If this were the issue, I would enjoy seeing it argued publicly; and could, from my own experience, take a strongly negative part in the debate. In fact there is no real argument against State aid to Catholic schools, except that the State hates to share any of its authority with any other body, including the Mystical Body of Christ.

In what ways do our schools suffer from the lack of State aid?

I have no doubt that other Catholics could supplement my statement vastly; but I can still think of a good many ways, without using any reference book.

We cannot afford to pay enough lay teachers to help the Religious, and so these same classes are also excessively large.

Because the classes are large, the teachers we do have are under a constant strain and are often obliged to resort to authoritarian teaching methods.

We cannot afford to build technical schools in which some of our children would be trained for trades; and so the children must go without this training or else get it from a secular school, and Brothers who might be cheerfully able to take classes in engineering are teaching English or social studies instead.

Frequently we cannot afford the minimum classroom facilities, and so both teachers and children are being deprived.

There is a simple answer to all this. I cannot see why it has not yet been put into effect. It is quite plain that the State in New Zealand looks with disfavour on Catholic schools, and would prefer that they did not exist. Let us bow to the will of the State.

page 425

I suggest with entire seriousness that our Bishops should on a publicised and predetermined date close down every single Catholic school in the country. Let the teachers have a well-earned holiday and devote their time to prayer or the playing of tennis or some other activity. It is a crime in this country for a parent to withhold his children from school. We are law-abiding people. Let us send all Catholic children en masse to the State schools, and let the State take over their education. We can demand that the State should do this – for do we not pay taxes for that very purpose! Then we can sit back with a quiet conscience. Nobody could possibly say that we had gone on strike.

Some Catholics in Australia did precisely this. As a result they received, among other things, interest-free State loans for the development of Catholic schools. I mean exactly what I say. I think it is time to call the State’s bluff.

1967 (466)